


dust to dust

by renegone



Series: heaven or hell (somewhere in between) [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Child Abuse, Pre-Series, Slight Canon Divergence, Slow Burn, inspired by the civil wars song it's titled for!, more establishment and buildup than actual romance but
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-14
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-13 01:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18458513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renegone/pseuds/renegone
Summary: "let me in the wall you've built around; and we can light a match and burn it down".glimpses into hawkeye, mustang, and the many years they have survived—together.





	dust to dust

Riza twists her ankle playing football with the neighbourhood boys.

Granted, she never had any business playing with them; for one, she isn’t very good at the sport, and for the other, she's a girl. The latter, she had no problem disguising; she was used to tucking her cropped hair into one of Roy’s page boy caps, which rendered the school boys were none the wiser unless she shrieked particularly too high. But she didn’t really talk all that much, so it never became that big of a problem. There was no way of hiding the former, however, as Riza was not particularly gifted with foot-eye coordination; the most sport she played was climbing trees and chasing Roy around the backyard when her father was too busy to scold them.

Still, they let her join, if only for the fact that one of the teams was down one player.  
  
Roy vouched for her, after all. At twelve years old, he stands as one of the eldest and bravest and most charismatic, often found playing mediator and rabble-rouser in equal measure, who dragged in Riza, the resident runt of the litter, into the fray. Although he was pricked with embarrassment every time she hogged the ball or tripped over her too-big shoes, he wanted to be nice and give her a shot. After all, the only time she could go out and play with kids their age was when he snuck her out to town—among them, she is different and eager and afraid, and more often than not became the subject of teasing.

(No one ever asked if he was her older brother because Roy’s eyes are slanted and his hair is black—there is also the fact that less than two years ago, Riza’s mother died and the people in town knew that she was Mrs. Hawkeye’s only, beloved daughter. Now she is the strange child that never leaves the immediate perimeter of her home, except for when Roy drags her out.)

So, above all, she is his responsibility.

When she falls on the ground in an unceremonious thud, clutching her leg and crying out, it’s Roy who has to call the game to a pause, collect Riza from the dirt, and help her stand up. They hobble as a pair to a shaded bench near some trees, and he leaves her with the promise of getting help. Several minutes (that feel more like hours) later, he returns with a well-meaning nurse in tow, a townswoman that Roy had managed to charm and convince to see to his weeping, injured friend. Riza allows herself to be helped, stiff upper lip and all, and they both say thank you in unison. 

He carries her on his back on the way home. Riza is a mess of sniffles and poorly concealed sobs the whole way through, but manages to collect herself enough to warm him _not_ to go through the front door, but the back door instead, and that he should leave her in her hiding place by the kitchen for the night—at least until the swelling goes down and she’s stopped being so upset.

Roy doesn’t ask why—he knows she’s scared of her father. He is too, sometimes. Mister Hawkeye is smart and scary in equal measure, but Roy doesn’t get the brunt of the latter because he’s the student, not the child. (He thinks this should be the opposite, but doesn’t question it on most days. In fact, he liked being the favourite.)

When he sets Riza down onto the mess of blankets and pillows she’d hoarded up in her hiding place (which was a small closet situated under the stairs by the kitchen), Roy feels frustrated on her behalf because she has to hide. Even when he’d misbehaved and gotten a proper earful, Chris Mustang had always made clear that he was welcome to her side and in her arms, no matter what. He thinks about bringing Riza to meet his aunt and all of his sisters someday while he takes in the measly hiding place, finds himself homesick for his old room and the living space above the bar, where even if he was the only boy surrounded by a gaggle of girls and there was always a fight over bathroom privileges, there were no favourites, just love. 

Instead of leaving for his room, Roy hunkers down and sits with Riza.

He is amused by the stack of books she’s been keeping on a lopsided shelf nailed directly across the door and takes turns reading with her (she chooses a book on animal evolution and he picks a novel whose words were too grandiose for either of them to digest), until they both fall asleep with their backs turned to each other.

Under the mess of blankets and sheets, the floor is hard and cold, and Roy is sure he develops a crick in his neck because of it. Riza, however, sleeps soundly.

In the morning, Roy thinks he’s bested her by waking up first, because the clock Riza had managed to bring into her hiding room told him it was five in the morning, well before sunrise and two hours ahead of when he was expected to be ready for lessons. But when he twists around she isn’t there, and when he opens the closet door, he sees her, two feet in front of him in the kitchen, already working on chores and starting breakfast. When he tries to offer his help, she bristles and sends him up to his room. _You should pretend to be sleeping. You know how father gets when he sees_ — _or, or_ _thinks_ _you haven’t had enough sleep; he’ll tell you you’re not concentrating hard enough and get mad._

In the days that follow, Roy does not understand why Riza is trying so hard to conceal her injury almost a week after sustaining it. She tries her best to hide the fact that she’s hobbling on one foot and wears long pants and socks and slippers in the house to conceal the bandages on her ankle. Besides, her ankle would have set and healed by now, and regardless, her father wouldn’t notice anyway; because Mister Hawkeye only notices Roy and the disorder of his bookshelves and the weather outside the window of his study—but not his own daughter. 

One night, Riza spills her glass of water at the dinner table and it just barely splashes the leather-bound cover of an ancient-looking book on alchemic principles— _that,_ Berthold Hawkeye notices. The fury in his voice and Riza’s downcast eyes and the way he’d seized her hand like a vice left nothing to Roy’s imagination: he thinks, had he not been there at the table, Berthold would have struck his own daughter.

 

(He decides he does not want to be the favourite anymore.)

 

Still, Riza is silent and takes the verbal lashing, nods and shakes her head when called for, and dutifully cleans the mess without ever lifting her gaze. Mister Hawkeye dismisses Roy to his room to go study and for a solid moment he sits straight backed in his chair, immovable, dark eyes flickering to look at Riza with concern (she doesn’t look up, of course, and instead is focused on wiping a stain on the table. Roy thinks that stain has been there longer than Riza’s been alive, but she’s still scrubbing at it like it was fresh and all her fault). He isn’t sure if he wants to leave her alone, but he complies anyways. ( _So much for bravery.)_

When Roy returns downstairs a few hours later, the table is immaculate and neither father nor daughter are present. He figures that Riza had gone to bed (her proper bed in her actual room) and that his teacher had gone to his study, so he opens his textbook and picks up where he left off, assuming his perch on the dining room table. The evening had gotten boring because Riza hadn't yet crept into his room to bother him about his lessons. He’d never admit it, but he found himself waiting for and subsequently missing her sing-song plea for him: _can you please_ _show me what father is teaching you, I want to learn too._

(He’s never showed her the real stuff, the actual alchemy parts. He’s shown her snippets of chemistry and philosophy but never once anything about transmutations. Roy had been instructed to keep it from her—and that he did. He was a good student, and even better at following rules and orders.)

Several pages into his chapter, he hears sniffling from one of the doors behind him and identifies it as the door to Riza’s hiding spot. When he raps his knuckles against the wooden door, asking for entrance, the sniffling comes to a halt and the door remains shut.

Maybe he’d been lacking in bravery, but Roy Mustang never ran out of stubbornness.

So he spends the night with his back against the wooden door, quietly reading aloud. He is sure that Riza is not particularly interested in the history of alchemists in Amestris but he reads on anyway. Besides, he knows that she is listening because he feels the press of her back against the other side of the door. Roy reads on and on about equations and laws and discoveries, and feels a triumphant gleam somewhere between his ribs when he hears her start to settle into the blankets.

 _Do you want to learn about alchemy?_ he asks in a hushed tone. Even though Berthold is two floors above them and most likely too engrossed in his research to pay whispering children any mind, Roy maintains a whisper. He produces a sketch of an array that he had tucked in the back of his book, folds it up neatly for good measure and slides it under the door. The paper crinkles, meets resistance; he is sure he’s poked her shoulder or her leg.

 

_If you let me in, I’ll teach you, Riza._

 

Silence. He can almost hear the cogs in her brain turning, considering his offer. He tries again:

 

_I won’t tell your father._

 

It’s quiet for a few moments, until he hears shifting behind the door and the unfolding of paper. The door cracks for just enough space for him to see her face and suddenly, Roy is beaming.

(This is one of his first, true lessons that the world isn’t simply black and white, that solutions do not come as easily as they do in an idealistic mind, that some things require more than science, more than hope, more than optimism, more than anything a human being can conjure or produce. Roy learns that the world can be crooked and mean and wrong and sometimes, there is very little, if at all, that can be done. Still, he continues to meet the ugliness of the world with the same hapless idealism. He’ll come to realize that, although Riza is younger and shier and more withdrawn, that she has come to accept this far earlier than he has.)

He is beaming until Riza looks him in the eye through the meager opening she made in the door and stares at him with a frown that wasn’t a frown but it made the smile on his face disappear all the same.

The paper gets crumpled into a ball in her palms.

 

She throws it at him and it barely misses his face.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They are a funeral party of two.

A few hours ago they’d buried Berthold Hawkeye, in a grave plot and casket and headstone Roy had paid for with his own salary. Riza thanks him with her genuine words (after all, she had no way of paying for the costs associated with her father’s death; she had just started working as a part-time shopkeep in a store in town and her father had not left her with very much) and her hospitality, allowing him to stay in the manor that she had no choice but to inherit.

She fluffs the pillows and sets out the nice linens for him in the guest bedroom while he makes his tour around the manor, collecting whatever belongings of his that Berthold hadn’t thrown out or that Riza hadn’t claimed as her own over the years. Together they planned to upturn the entire place to find whatever items they could sell so that Riza would have some padding to support herself with in the coming months. She finds him sometime that evening in her father’s study, perusing his stacks of research papers and books. Riza hadn’t touched them while her father was alive, and she is even less inclined to do so in his death, so there is a silent gratitude for the fact that it is Roy's responsibility to sort through it all. 

She allows him to search for whatever he is looking for—Riza had never thought of her father’s work as something she could police, much less something she is to inherit. It was always Roy who was slated to carry it on, until he decided to enlist in the military and her father went berserk. She wonders, sometimes, if Roy’s enlistment had been one of the things that did him in, her father’s already precarious health sliding closer to detrimental upon the knowledge that his prized, most favoured protege had signed himself up as a tool of the state. She imagines him writhing in his grave if, for some reason, he could see Roy now, in his dress blues,  digging through his piles of precious research. 

Riza hangs in the doorway, shoulder and hip flush to the frame, and watches him comb through the papers and pages with rapt earnest. Some papers he puts back neatly where he’d found them, others he would re-read twice and file into another, smaller stack that she assumed he intends to keep.

She had come to her decision earlier in the day, at the grave, when Roy had spoken to her about his ambition and goals and hopes—all that is left is the revelation. She crosses the room, quiet footfalls allowed by her stockinged feet, and she knows he hears her moving through the room but doesn’t look up from his search. Riza watches him pour through a beaten up old journal whose cover or contents she hadn’t bothered to read, and after a few breaths, moves to touch his hand.

The gesture gains his attention immediately, and Riza says only three words: _Come with me._  

She leads him to her bedroom, on the familiar creaking hallway they’d padded through so many times in their childhood. He looks affronted when she begins to unbutton her blouse and has at least three different types of protest tumbling from his mouth as the silk slides down her arms. She has never been the greatest with words—perhaps she’ll have to get better at them soon, but for now, she knows that actions are more of her strong suit.

Riza lets the blouse drop and shows him her back in full, with all the red writing and inscription bared.

She doesn’t need to see his face to know what emotions were flashing through his features—Riza can just about _feel_ the wonder, awe, disbelief, concern, determination, and wariness thick in the air, reverberating from his being.  

She holds back from telling him the full story, that in the months that he was gone serving in the military, her father had inscribed each and every painstaking detail into the expanse of her back; the secrets to flame alchemy, the keys to his most prized research. For now, she won’t tell him about the pain, the regret, the fear, and the horror; the way she agreed because she’d foolishly thought that finally, her father valued her enough to include her in his legacy. ( _I_ _am dying, Thereza,_ it was the first time he’d called her by that name since her mother’s passing what felt like a lifetime ago, _But my work doesn’t have to die with me. Please, help your father. I need you to help me.)_

Neither will she tell Roy about how often she asked her father to stop and how often he managed to convince her to let him continue. Instead, she focuses on Roy's awe and the way he is careful yet keen in his analysis.

When Roy is finished taking notes and practicing and studying for the evening, he sings praises of her. He thanks her, promises her that he’ll use this knowledge she’s _gifted him_ for the good.

For his dream, for _theirs._

(Riza wasn’t too sure there was a place for her in his dream before, because his dream was in full technicolor, draped in Amestrian blue, and decorated with medals of valour. It tasted of steel and iron and fire, and she doesn’t know how well she would fit in that narrative, if it would even make room for her rabbit heart. But now, it is irrevocable.)

Over dinner, Roy waxes poetic about his duty, his service, and all the differences he’s going to make; he also barks on about how being a soldier is gruelling work, that he can’t shoot straight (which they’d tried to remedy the night before, shooting rounds from Berthold’s old shotguns into some makeshift targets in the backyard—Riza managed to drill each bullseye near perfect, and helped Roy correct his technique) and has only made one good friend in his batch so far. He goes on about how the military isn’t for everybody, how there’s been pressure and conflict at the borders, and that he’s serving for the people who can’t—for the people who _shouldn’t._ Riza thinks she’ll never forget the way he looked at her when he’d said that, every inch of him protecting and proud.

 _Maybe I’ll be a teacher,_ she tells him after he’s pestered her enough. Somehow they wind up at the edge of her bed by the tail-end of the evening, with a bottle of cheap wine they’d found in the cellar passed between them. It’s a plain ambition, disinteresting at best. Unlike him, she had no true plan in motion: Riza didn’t know if she had enough money to go to university, much less did she know if she had any desire to study at all. Her days were spent working in town and feeding the strays and then promptly scaring them off whenever she’d make use of her makeshift shooting range—she’d become stagnant, stationary, recluse.

 _A teacher,_ he considers it without a hint of disappointment or judgement. Roy sounds happy for her, even when she’s just made it up on the spot (and she’s certain he can tell). But the way Roy looks at her makes her consider that she could, in fact, be a teacher—or a doctor or an actress or any other damn thing she could ever want to be.

He looks at her like he believes in her, and she imagines that she looks at him the same way.

 

At breakfast before he leaves for the city, Roy notices that she’s wearing a skirt and a blouse and that her hair is getting longer, now past her ears; he points this out to her with muted affection, even allows it to transcend into his embrace on his way out.

 _Visit soon,_ she says when they pull away from each other. She can see the hesitation, the uncertainty in his features — _maybe he doesn’t know when the next time he’ll be able to leave his duty will be_ — and the charming smile that quickly follows.

 _I’ll call you,_ he says as he waves from his rolled-down car window. Sometimes, Riza still thinks it’s unbelievable that Roy Mustang is driving his own car and wearing a military uniform and that he slicks his hair back every morning without fail as a way to cope with the apparently dreadful standardized military haircut.

He follows through on his word and calls her the very same evening when he gets back to his bunk. He calls her as often as he can, through the allotted minutes he’s given in between his rigorous schedule. Months pass and he still calls her without fail: ear pressed to the receiver, Riza couldn’t help the burgeoning smiles or the laughs he’d manage to pull from her, even though each day she spent alone at the manor felt like she was rotting from the inside out. Her days were monotone: work in town in the morning, back to the house by early afternoon. She’s needed to buy new ammunition, with how often she’s been using her now upgraded personal shooting range. She’s also read almost all the books in the manor library cover to cover and taken in a dog that still spends most of its time wandering around town instead of making itself at home on the grounds. These small details of her life she exaggerates somewhat, when it’s her turn to share her days’ and life’s events on the phone.

The inscriptions on her back feel like heavy lead on good days and on bad days, she thinks she still feels phantom pain from the needles and the heat from months and months ago. His voice, though grainy and measured across the phone line, stills the slippery, ugly rot she feels inside of her. Most of the time, it’s just enough to quell the demons nipping at her heels.

One night, he confesses that he spends his minutes calling his aunt (and sisters, who apparently spend more time fighting over the phone than actually speaking to him) and Riza _only_ , in his attempted confident yet sheepish way she has always been familiar with.

He tells her: _Riza, I think they’re sending me out to the border. They need me there,_ and she can feel the nervousness and excitement and bravado bleeding out with each word, _It could get dangerous, but I’ll be fine. It’s a peacekeeping operation. And it’s just, well_ — _never mind. Anyway,_ _I might get some time off before they send me out. Maybe I’ll come see you, or_ _you can come see me._

She feels his smile through the line and it’s warm like the sun. If she thinks hard enough, Riza can just about see the glint in his eyes and the dent of a dimple in his cheek.

Roy speaks with duty and certainty laced in his voice, a far cry from the uncertain new recruit he’d been almost a year ago. He has purpose now, as a soldier. Roy is moving forward, ambitious as ever—and she’s still stuck in the mud. 

 _But not for long,_ she promises herself internally while Roy is lamenting about the restaurant in East City he wants to take her to because the food is cheap but the service is impeccable.

The lead-like weight in her gut is back, but this time it isn’t because of the secrets carved into her skin.

 

Riza doesn’t have the heart to tell him she’s already planned a trip to Central for the next recruitment.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Roy gets a bullet lodged in him, courtesy of an Ishvalan soldier. It fell several inches below his heart on the wrong side of his body and it hurt like a motherfucker; he wonders if the aim had been shit because the gunman was an actual bad shot or if it was because he was too young with far too little training to be able to shoot straight.

A year ago, he might have had the strength to stir up anger. He might have used the gunshot as fuel to the (literal) fire and it could have caused him to go into the battlefield with a renewed vigour to be an even more volatile weapon of the state.  
  
Now, he sees it as penitence.  
  
The medical tent is packed—the Amestrian military is in serious need of doctors, because the good ones are in short supply and a handful of others, dead. While one of them digs out the bullet, Roy overhears in his haze that they’re going to start recruiting civilian doctors by conscription, outsourcing them from hospitals and private practices all across Amestris. In the same breath, they tell him to keep the wound clean and change the dressings often. He spends a night or two in the cot recovering, then he is promptly dismissed to his own tent to continue healing there.

Of course, he isn’t allowed to be down and out for too long.

It is made more than apparent that the Flame Alchemist is necessary out on the battlefront.

(Roy thinks he wouldn’t be needed if this was just a regular war, that the constant spray of bullets and man-made explosives could take his place; there was more than enough artillery to get the job done. He envies the gunmen and the snipers and everyone else who had a weapon as an extension of their person—they could at least put the firearms away when the fighting’s all done. Unlike them, Major Roy Mustang couldn’t just chop off his hands and rid the air of the elements he combusts. He has to use his hands to eat and wash and dress, and he breathes the very elements that he transmutes into hellfire.)  

He often forgets to tend to his wound until it starts itching and stinking and soaking through.  
  
Riza, gently, without ever once meeting his eyes, does it for him in the small moments when they share a post or watch duty. Her hands are gentle, her fingers lithe — Roy imagines they need to be that way in order to be responsible with a trigger. But it wasn’t as if bullets were in short supply; Riza had remarked under her breath the other day as they sat in a circle with Hughes and the other soldiers that they were _rationing everything but bullets_. Roy remembers her tone, despite its softness against the rumble of other voices in the camp, having come off acidic and dry. No one else heard her cutting remark but him. He wonders if she meant for that.

When she tends to him, Riza bandages his torso carefully, quietly. She keeps her eyes downcast but he studies her openly, with as much rapt attention as his sleepless, guilt-riddled brain will allow. Roy sees the bags under her eyes and the gaunt in her cheeks and the sunburnt, weatherbeaten texture of her skin. He watches her in the lamplight, his throat trembling with words left unsaid. There is so much to say yet nothing comes out from either of them, as though their tongues had been tied with wire that would be tripped if they dared to say a single word.

Perhaps it was because they both already expended their anger and sorrow and regret in hushed but dangerous tones of confrontation not long after Riza arrived to camp. She let him say his piece, allowed him to berate her on her choice to enlist. The hard look in her eyes cut him more than any of the words she barely said.

 

 _They needed soldiers,_ she said.

 

 _But they didn’t need you,_ he argued.

 

What she did not tell him is: _I had nowhere else to go, but I wanted to go very far. I couldn’t stay in that goddamn house anymore. I followed you like a lost dog because I have no one else. I need to keep you alive. I thought I was doing the right thing._ _You are a killing machine because I let you learn how to be one._

What terrified Riza the most is that he already knew it, all her regrets and fears.

In the silence, they find peace—the fleeting, quiet moments they share have become something of a truce, brought to life by canteens quietly passed between rough hands and a space to breathe, away from the chaos and the comrades and the calamity of it all. 

The desert air forces sand and ash into their eyes and lungs but in a way, it is cleansing.

 

The desert sun, however, remains unforgiving.

 

 

* * *

 

 

  
Riza’s back is singed in three distinct, marred, and crying places. The flesh weeps, fluid oozes, and she sobs onto the towel that she bites down on. Roy vomited sometime after the first strike, the smell of burning flesh causing his stomach contents to make a reappearance. Riza had used those minutes to breathe, to cry, to gag—it felt like she was drowning and being burned and buried alive, all at once.

Still, she never told him to stop.  
  
Riza shoves the towel back in between her teeth (and grabs a fistful of whatever was left hanging with her hand: this, she uses to cover her nose) before Roy has a chance to wipe his mouth. He is sick, in every sense of the word. He lurches again when he straightens out and sees a full view of her back and the burns he’s created, but nothing comes up because he’s wretched it all out already.

He tries to apologize. She does not contest it, but neither does she accept it.  
  
Silence lay thick in between strikes, save for their ragged breathing. The stench of burnt flesh and vomit and exhaustion permeated every single one of their senses. He destroys as much of the tattoo as he can, before the tremor in his fingers overcomes his entire hand and he has to stop because his precision is off and Riza had finally passed out from the pain.

After, Roy burns the bandages and the towels and the sheets and the ignition glove—if they weren’t using the Hawkeye manor as a safe house, he is sure he would have burnt it down to the ground too. He washes his hands over and over until they are raw and red and burning. It becomes a ritual, done so often that his hands become dry and cracked.

They spend several nights in the manor but sleep in different rooms. She takes her own room and Roy gets the guest bedroom. Berthold Hawkeye’s bedroom remains untouched save for the books and writings and manuscripts he’d written that Roy burned too, but not before Riza had gotten to them first and ripped whatever she could to shreds. She’d ripped pages and peeled spines and covers off books and torn every single thing that contained her father’s work. She wanted every word and symbol and diagram she did not fully (and never wants to) understand, destroyed.

Riza doesn’t let him comfort her.

Roy does not know how.

All he knows is to burn: he burned at Ishval and he burned her back and he burns the food he tries to cook for them, not because he’s abhorrent in the kitchen but rather because his hands won’t stop shaking and his mind is elsewhere, most often stewing in regret. He buys bread and cheese and takeaway dinners from restaurants in town, sets them on a plate that he leaves at her bedside table at every meal hour like clockwork. He even gets drunk one night but has the decency to do it in a bar in town, and ends up sleeping in the inn above it. Inebriated but unforgetting, Roy lets the guilt of leaving Riza alone in such a state gnaw at him for several long hours before he falls properly asleep for the first time in a week.  
  
Riza spends the days and nights in bed. Unspeaking, only moving to use the toilet and to eat when she’s starving. She notes the way that Roy hovers for a few moments after he’s changed her dressings. She hears him pad and shuffle around the creaky home. She tastes the coffee he makes and the food he burns. She listens to the opening of drawers and the thudding of footsteps, and, when she listens closely enough and he is brave enough to be near, his breathing and the exhaustion held within each breath.  
  
She says nothing.  
  
On the last day, when he leaves before her so as not to drum up any more suspicion, he changes her dressings one last time. He turns to wash his hands but she grabs his wrist instead. She breathes in deeply—the room smells like antiseptic and floor cleaner and stale coffee. On the exhale, she watches his fingers flex and jolt and relax, almost as if he’s wanting to touch her too.

Riza finally lets go when she sees him pivot and turn his shoulders towards her, and looks away when she sees his mouth open to speak. His farewell hangs in the air between them and the silence swallows it up whole. She doesn’t remember if she said anything back.

 

A week later when they are back to their posts, Rebecca compliments Riza about her _impeccable_ posture. Riza smiles her practiced, most polite smile, and tries to ignore the chafing bandages still affixed to her torso underneath her uniform.

When Roy passes her desk, neither of them look up. Neither do they breathe. They become experts at eluding each other, the blessing of avoidance already a given due to their difference in rank and schedule. It continues until they are reduced to being ghosts in each other’s periphery.

 

One day she finds him scrubbing his hands raw in the mess hall sink, at the end of the dinner hour and well after every other officer has returned to their post.

She walks in, quiet as ever, and without so much as a word reaches over and shuts off the faucet that had been raining down blisteringly hot water onto Roy’s hands. They stand there for a few moments, the last remnants of the water trickling down the drain and pipes.

They turn to truly face each other for the first time in what feels like centuries. They look older, more polished (perhaps spending more days indoors at a desk proved to be better on the complexion than the scorching desert sun and wind), more broken, more new.

Still, what they have done cannot be so easily washed away.

 

He catches her at the end of the evening, when they both have already changed into civilian dress. Roy finds her on the steps while wearing a three-piece suit and doesn’t bother hiding the way he considers the hemline of her skirt and the clack of her heels, not wolfish, just confident—so different from the worn out, haunted man she’d encountered earlier in the day. _Would you like to have a drink with me, Lieutenant?,_ the tilt of his mouth, upturned in the slightest of charismatic smiles, and the flow of his voice catches Riza off guard. He sounds less like the exhausted soldier she’d familiarized herself with and instead more like the choppy haired, cheeky man who spent his days on leave visiting her in a manor sat atop a hill on the edge of a backwater town. She watches him, barely concealing the wariness in her eyes, before accepting his offer.

 

Seated one stool apart at Madame Christmas’ bar an hour after closing, Roy and Riza sip and stew.

She comes at him first, bluntly: _We can stop punishing ourselves_ — _for now._

It sounds like an order. He is about to start speaking, the formulation of a rebuttal on the tip of his tongue. Something about being deserving of pain, of punishment, of the very same hell they’ve brought upon innocents. The hardness in her eyes holds his tongue for him.

_It isn’t right that we keep feeling sorry for ourselves. There are more important things to do, and we’re just wasting time._

Quiet. Roy knocks back another sip, makes a mental note to order something stronger if they end up staying for longer. Beer is water when compared to the sting puncturing his insides as he listens to Riza speak, her voice all flint and steel.

 _You have a goal,_ she says. They stopped referring to it as a dream somewhere in the sand dunes of Ishval. _We have to see it through. Only then can we make real change and pay for what we’ve done._

He is quiet and still for a few more moments before he clinks the neck of his bottle to hers. 

 _Here, here,_ he says, a chuckle chasing his words. Roy’s grin is back and she only lets the warmth of it slip into her partially.

Riza goes home that evening wondering if she’d gotten through him at all, or if she’d have to spend the next however many months and years watching him wallow in guilt and torn up pride hidden carefully under all his bravado.

She wonders if she’ll have a front row seat to see his catharsis or his coming undone—if she’ll have to bear witness and have no choice but to pick up the pieces, even when she can barely make sense of her own.

 

 

The next day, a letter arrives on her desk with special instruction to report to her new post as Colonel Mustang’s personal adjutant.

**Author's Note:**

> i recently finished my fma:b rewatch and was reminded of exactly how much i love these two and their dynamic. the timeline might be skewy but i hope it read somewhat smoothly! i'm hoping to add a continuing fic that takes them through the series, and then maybe a post-canon one as well. really, i just want every excuse to write and flesh them out. 
> 
> thank you so much for reading!
> 
> edit: just noting that i edited some typos/odd sentences i found and agonized over while re-reading.


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